What happens to the ampersand on the internet?

There's not enough symbols on my keyboard, so let's invent a code so we can write other symbols

1. lets say & means start of code
2. and say ; means end of code
3. Between the start and end is the code

Now let's make some real symbols

• ¢ can be ¢
• © can be ©
• ÷ can be ÷

I want to tell other people how to use our new code, but if I tell them to "just write ÷" it'll turn my message into "just write ÷" !! So how can we fix this?

What if we make & its own code?

• & —> &
• ÷ —> ÷ ???

Yes! That'll work :)

This is how & came to be, and it's specifically used in HTML as a way to write those symbols above (and escape other a few other symbols for similar reasons we did with &)

As for why & shows up as &, there are 2 main places I can see this happening:

1. The editor you use to write it automatically converts an & —> &. But the user typed in & (making it &). I think this is most likely. I'm guessing the title of posts automatically do the conversion, but the post body and comments do not because it uses a raw markdown editor
2. In some contexts the & specifically doesn't get converted? like how you can write `&` to get & as opposed to seeing ＆